How Lufthansa Cargo is forging a sustainable, digital future

 How Lufthansa Cargo is forging a sustainable, digital future

Lufthansa Cargo, one of the world’s leading companies in the transport of air freight, has been making significant strides in the direction of embracing sustainability and digitalization – one innovation at a time. 

The German cargo carrier has been on an interesting path of forging a future built with sustainability goals in mind and has rolled out a number of decisions exhibiting this especially under the leadership of Dorothea von Boxberg, Chairperson of the Executive Board and CEO of Lufthansa Cargo who took charge this March. 

This also comes close on the heels of the air carrier having clocked an impressive year after its revenues reached historic highs, even as the global air cargo demand has reached above 2019 levels. Despite global air freight capacity crunch leading to a fall in sales, there was an improvement in its cargo load factor and yields were up in all regions served by Lufthansa Cargo.

Scaling sustainable solutions

Incidentally, IATA has committed to a carbon-neutral airline growth starting from 2021 and envisioned a 50 percent reduction in Co2 emissions by 2050. Making a series of deft moves in this direction, Lufthansa Cargo has been partnering with other companies for sustainable innovations and future for the air freight industry and contributes to sustainable goals of the industry and to the world in general. 

Incidentally, last December saw Lufthansa Cargo enter into a partnership with DB Schenker for starting its first Co2 neutral freight flight connection. In line with this, a cargo flight completed a round trip for the first time in commercial aviation, whose fuel requirement was completely covered by SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel). 

Outlining her plans on sustainability, Von Boxberg said, “My vision is to be the most efficient air carrier. I would really like to offer my customers the shipment with the lowest carbon footprint and that’s what we are working on. So having a pure 777 fleet (Boeing 777 freighters) is a major step towards that, as that is the most efficient aircraft right now. Having the right aircraft can make a huge difference.”

Later this May, another partnership between Lufthansa Technik and BASF saw the duo create surface film that mimics a shark’s skin that has the ability to reduce fuel consumption and emissions significantly. This technology called ‘AeroSHARK’ is slated to be rolled out on Lufthansa Cargo’s entire freighter fleet from the beginning of 2022. 

Von Boxberg added, “The next thing is how we can save kerosene once we have got the right aircraft and that is where a topic like ‘shark skin’ comes in. So shark skin helps in reducing drag, which is supposed to save us one percent of fuel, which is a lot. We also work on many other things like lightweight containers, approach and descent procedures for pilots, so that there are many ways to save additional fuel. It’s really small things, that are less than one percent; but even if it is one percent, these kinds of savings are fantastic.”

Lufthansa Cargo is also actively looking to reduce its carbon footprint. While reducing the use of fuel is one solution, a move towards bio fuels like the SAF looks promising and yet comes with its own challenges. 

Von Boxberg avers, “Sustainable Aviation Fuels are very limited in availability today. All of the production today is by food waste or from crops but that is not super scalable. And while it is more possible today, yet it won’t fill all the aircraft. So while we look for partners in the industry that we can buy from, we also look for customers who can help us finance it because it’s not the airline industry that can bear that burden. In the end it really needs to come from the shippers and the end consumers. We need to discuss this with our customers as well.”